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About Me

I live and blog in Ann Arbor, Michigan. University of Michigan BA and MA from Eastern Michigan University. One term in the Michigan Army National Guard. The Institute of Land Warfare, Army magazine, Military Review, and Joint Force Quarterly have published my occasional articles.

The Undead Archives

My undead archives pre-Blogger were actually restored to life after Geocities sites went dark. Start at the old home page here.
If you find a link to the old site on the current site or old site, you should be able to replace the "g" in "geocities" with an "r" and make a good link.
I hope to move all the older archives here (and started that project) but it is really tedious.

Monday, May 25, 2015

The Beginning of Wisdom

Is Assad going to retreat to a core Syria? Or is even that too much to hold now?

In January 2012, I wrote that Assad had to contract his realm to a core Syria in the west because he was losing ground trying to hold everything, and then rebuild his army to reconquer the entire country.

"The division of Syria is inevitable. The regime wants to control the coast, the two central cities of Hama and Homs and the capital Damascus," one Syrian political figure close to the regime said.

"The red lines for the authorities are the Damascus-Beirut highway and the Damascus-Homs highway, as well as the coast, with cities like Latakia and Tartus," he added, speaking on condition of anonymity. ...

Can 175,000 army, militia, Hezbollah, and Shia foreign legion troops hold perhaps 13 million people? Not if you assume Assad needs troops at 2% of the population to have a chance of pacifying and/or protecting the population. That rule of thumb implies Assad needs 260,000 troops. Or needs to control fewer than 9 million people.

Would Russia send troops to bolster Assad's morale? That would be dramatic and would suit Putin's image of action. With the bonus of sticking it to America. Here's a real red line of Russian soldiers, eh? Hell, he'd probably be first off the transport plane (shirtless, of course) for the photo op.

Also note that Iran doesn't need all of Syria. They need access to Hezbollah in Lebanon in order to have a front against Israel. And Hezbollah needs that supply route, too. A core Syria does that.

As long as they have the money to bolster Assad (which is why Iran is counting on a faux nuclear deal with America, which would lift sanctions), that's fine as far as Iran is concerned.

As I've said, you'd think that the idea that Iran is willing to fight Israel to the last Arab should be an obvious information warfare topic to alienate Arab Shias from Persian Shia Iran. If we thought of Iran as an enemy rather than a proto-partner, of course.

Assad is fighting for survival in western Syria where he can still function as an outpost of Iran; and will let America deal with ISIL which controls half of Syria's formal territory now. Let's not forget that both are our enemies.

Turkey has agreed to provide support, including air support, for non-ISIL Syrian rebels. That’s a dwindling group as ISIL continues fighting with rebels who refuse to come under ISIL command. Turkey has not signed a final deal but wanted everyone to know where the discussions were going. Meanwhile Russia and Iran are calling for a peaceful, political settlement of the Syrian civil war. Considering the ISIL attitude towards the rest of the world, that is not likely. Russia and Iran are both having financial problems (because of low oil prices) at home and support for the Assads is very unpopular. So far Russia and Iran are not willing to take the political hit for abandoning the Assads, but that aid is not as generous as it used to be.

If Russia and Iran won't be as generous, Assad must shrink to a core or rump Syria.

But Turkey is not going to let Assad survive unmolested as the big fish in a smaller pond.

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Note on site statistics: When I strip out the junk hits from Blogger statistics that seem to come and go in waves, I appear to have about 10,000 hits per month.

My old statistics package, Site Meter, seems to miss a lot and even disappears visits after they've appeared.

I just added a new StatCounter. So far it shows far fewer hits than Blogger and is more in line with Site Meter. But I suspect neither of the non-Blogger statistics register hits from social media. So I'm not sure what my audience size is. It is puzzling to me.